HUE in Education

HUE in Education

The Primary National Strategy encourages teachers to “Create a visual adaptation of a simple text using toys, modelling clay, play figures and stop-frame animation techniques”.

Animation means children have to solve problems, make decisions and judgements, evaluate and improve their projects and review and reflect on their learning.

Animation is a multifaceted form of art. You have to create a story, create characters, make them from modelling clay or plasticine, design and make sets, compose soundtracks, write narration or select appropriate recorded music to enhance a film. Animation means children have to solve problems, make decisions and judgements, evaluate and improve their projects and review and reflect on their learning. Children have fun with their friends making a film, often not realising that they are in fact working hard, learning new skills, applying new theories and sharing fresh ideas.

We’ve put together some suggestions for ways to bring your lessons to life with animation here and teacher testimonials can be read here.

Schools wishing to place an order can do so using a purchase order or send us a quotation request through the website shop.

Classroom Spotlight

Dr. Jane Bowser from High Point University in High Point, North Carolina . Dr. Bowser’s education students completed a very successful first project using myCreate for iPad and Lego StoryStarters with students from a local elementary school.

Students in Dr. Bowser’s class are working towards their degrees in education and developed a series of six to eight hour-long lessons that were used over the course of the fall semester. The university class worked with students from one of the local Title I elementary schools for the project. The university students and the elementary students then created their final project in a morning long session on campus at High Point University.

Dr. Bowser told us, “The combination of the hands-on construction with Lego StoryStarters and the ease of capturing the story with myCreate resulted in an all around successful experience for the K12 students and teacher candidates alike!”

Click here to see an example of the project from one of the university students.

Case Studies

Read a selection of one-page case studies from our work with schools and education facilities in the United States.

The St. Francis School for the Deaf in Brooklyn, NY has been using stop-motion for several years to give their students an alternative medium for understanding word problems, idioms, and place value.

Boston Arts Academy, an urban Boston school, has taken advantage of SAM Animation as an application to guide students from researching a subject matter to understanding a grading rubric. Utilized across science and math, this case study highlights the specific application to geometry.

A rural high school in Littleton, NH had the privilege of being one of the early adopters of SAM Animation. As an alternative to traditional lab reports, students were tasked with showing what’s happening at the molecular level during an experiment.

The McCarthy Towne school in Acton, MA, a suburb of Boston, utilized stop-motion animation at the lower grade levels as a mechanism to understand other cultures, such as Ghana in this particular example.

Polaris at Ebert, a magnet Denver public school, has every first and second grader create their own project using SAM Animation. From understanding geological formations to animal habitats, the students gain the skills needed to dream, plan, and execute an idea.

Research outside Tufts University further supports the efficacy of SAM Animation (now known as HUE Animation) in the classroom. Leaders in their fields, Jean Piaget and Eleanor Duckworth, both provide evidence that when children produce something themselves, thereby becoming authors, they experience an enhanced learning experience.

As early as 1959, Piaget recognized the importance of building new knowledge by exploring and revising our existing knowledge – a process that comes to life through working with SAM (now known as HUE Animation).

More recently, Eleanor Duckworth has done work out of Harvard University on the difference between presenting children with ideas and them developing a true understanding of those ideas through their own personal struggles to find individual meaning; to become owners of their own knowledge.

It is possible, then, for a child’s understanding of this kind of necessary relationship to evolve in especially devised situations more quickly than it would spontaneously. But it is not the pressure of data that gives rise to the understanding. It is, on the contrary, the child’s own struggle to make sense of the data.

You can purchase her book, The Having of Wonderful Ideas and Other Essays on Teaching and Learninghere for more information.

SAM Animation (now known as HUE Animation) is a classroom tool that can help facilitate this kind of in-depth understanding for students. By having them plan, explain, and create, they become authors and producers of their own knowledge, rather than passive recipients of classroom lessons.